Fertig! Verfallen! Verlumpt! Verblunget! Verkackt!
I think the fair thing to do is to regard Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank not with contempt that it exists, but with amazement that it survived to be released. Though I think you could temper that amazement with a little bit of contempt. That would be fair.
Still, let's not get too far afield from the shocking fact that this movie somehow crawled its way to the light after one of the most god-damnedest misadventures in animated film production this side of Foodfight! And, I mean, there you go - Paws of Fury could easily have been as bad as Foodfight!, but it's not even close. I would go so far as to say that Paws of Fury isn't even the worst children's action-comedy about a talking dog given wide release in North American theaters in July 2022, though I admit that while "better than Foodfight!" is clearing a bar that has been buried beneath several feet of dirt, "better than DC League of Super-Pets" is clearing a bar that has merely been nestled into the grass. And Paws of Fury still clips it on the way over.
Anyway, I don't think I'm doing a good job of being fair, and one does at least like to try. The thing is, this poor little ugly, unpleasant wretch of a movie had such a strange trip into theaters. The idea was born in 2010, when animation executive and producer Yair Landau hit upon an idea that is simple enou- no, it isn't. It really isn't. The idea is, somehow, "let's remake Mel Brooks's racism satire Blazing Saddles as a children's animated comedy about a Black samurai." Somebody pitched that. Other people thought it sounded good. And then a little bit after that pitch, somebody in all that thought what really needed to happen was that instead of being about an African samurai (possibly because Afro-Samurai was, literally, already taken, and there was some degree of shame that could penetrate the makers of this misbegotten concept), it should instead be about a dog, because children like comedies about talking animals, and he should face racism from cats, and that was the idea that was announced to the world as Blazing Samurai in 2014, though it wasn't until 2015 that it received a 2017 release date and an infamous teaser poster that was, for years, the only image associated with the film that existed.
The longer the movie went without meeting that or any release date, and without there being literally any other information than that cat's prodigious ass, the more it felt that Blazing Samurai simply had to be some kind of money-laundering affair. Having now seen the finished film, I'm not remotely prepared to write off that explanation. But anyway, I wasn't done with the story: between 2015 and 2019, there was basically nothing but that poster, haunting the places where new releases get announced, looming. The original production company and distributor both went out of business. And then in 2019, it was re-announced as having been completely re-structured financially, given its new title, picked up by a new set of production companies and instead of being a UK-USA co-production, it was now a UK-USA-Canada co-production, and at some point after 2019, China got involved. And again, I'm not willing to say it's not money laundering. The original directing team of Chris Bailey & Mark Koetsier got a little shuffle, becoming the directing team of Koetsier & Rob Minkoff, the latter of whom was originally a producer (and originally, long before that, co-directed The Lion King, and I imagine must have just a ton of questions about his career path), though Bailey retains a credit. When the dust had all settled and the contracts sorted, the film ended up with nine production companies to its name, seven credited producers, and twenty-five credited executive producers. Paramount Pictures, which ended up distributing the movie in most of the world, ended up acquiring those rights for all of $10 million, against a budget of at least $40-$45 million.
So anyway, given that God Himself tried to intervene to prevent Paws of Fury from ever coming out into the light of day, it's not half an achievement that the film is actually, like, watchable. The animation is pretty lousy, with all of the characters moving too stiffly, like they were rigged with too few points of articulation, and eyes that seem to glow and hover apart from their faces like flying saucers, but the characters have fairly readable expressions, and there's a lot of stylisation, particularly when somebody flashes back and their flashback is in strong, high-contrast color, flat lighting, and simplified textures, so it appears more like the pages of a four-color comic book in motion than anything else. Whether this stylisation is appropriate I leave as an irrelevant question, since nothing about Paws of Fury is well-conceived enough for "appropriate" to matter. Frankly, the more inappropriate something is for this bizarro-world concept, the likelier it is to be interesting.
Because, again, this is exactly the plot of Blazing Saddles (that film's screenwriters all receive credit - not even for the original script, they're credit with this script of this very movie), with cat hatred of dogs replacing human racism, and an extremely generic feudal Japan setting replacing the 19th Century American West. It's not merely the same story, in fact, there are many of the same jokes, including some said by the same man, since Mel Brooks himself has returned (he's one of those 25 EPs) to voice basically the same character as the corrupt governor he played in the 1974 film. Only not corrupt, since it's a kids' film, and thus has to be nice. But anyway, there are so many jokes that get recycled, having been carefully scrubbed down to family-friendliess. There is even, of all the possible jokes to bring back, a variation on "The sheriff is a ni-[bell rings]"; "The samurai is a do-[ring]" / "The samurai is a dong?" Which is, arguably, not even very family friendly.
It's all very baffling, how much "there" isn't there. Paws of Fury ended up with a weirdly well-supplied cast of actors that I cannot imagine were cheap, at least for the leads: Michael Cera is Hank, the hapless dog who wants to be the protector samurai of a town, Samuel L. Jackson is Jimbo (which is one of the vanishingly few subtle jokes here, combining "Jim", the Gene Wilder character from Blazing Saddles, and the iconic 1961 samurai masterpiece Yojimbo), the catnip addict ex-samurai who resentfully helps him, Ricky Gervais is Ika Chu, the scheming land owner who wants to destroy the tiny village of Kakamucho (which is, at least, permitted to remain relatively subtle, in that the film only has one explicit poop joke). The cast list continues on to give small roles to Michelle Yeoh, Gabriel Iglesias, Aasif Mandvi, Djimon Hounsou, and George Takei, the last of whom has to say "oh my" like five times, because apparently screenwriters Ed Stone and Nate Hopper ran out of ideas for jokes when they got past "re-use the original script but be sure to take out all the slurs and swears".
That's not a "best of all time" sort of cast, but it has some real talent - real talent who are in many cases actually trying (it is, in fact, downright surreal that Jackson, in particular, seems to be so invested in what he's doing, given how many years it's been since he last seemed this alive in live-action cinema. Then again, he might very well have recorded these lines back in 2015). So why squander them on such profoundly uninspired material? The best I can say about Paws of Fury is that there's something kind of dreamily fascinating and strange in hearing Brooks-style comedy, built around ridiculous flights of fancy and illogic and mundane surrealism, coming out of cartoon characters, who actually can be surreal and physically impossible in ways that makes the absurdity even more absurd. And, I mean, part of what you get when you rifle through the one-liners from one of the funniest screenplays of the 1970s is a whole movie full of road-tested comic dialogue, and none of the actors seem to mind that they're eating leftovers (even Brooks is doing something notably different).
When the film breaks away from Blazing Saddles, the results are pretty grim. Often it immediately races towards trite children's movie sentiments that were already stale in the 2000s, right about the time that the "talking animal comedy" itself became an ossified cliché. Some of the jokes just work much too hard for their idiocy, especially scatology: the film has an aggressively labored fart sequence that's based, of course, on the one from the older movie, but feels much heavier; there's also a bit that is just murderously bad when Hank announces that he needs to piss on a wall to mark his territory, something that feels totally alien to anything else in the movie to such a degree that even the other characters notice it.
So a bad movie, and when it is a "good movie", it's only because of shameless, open theft. But it is a miracle that it exists at all to be bad, and I have to admire that. Well, not "have to". And I don't actually admire it. But it's a defiant little bugger, the purest example of a film maudit clawing its way to the surface we've had in a very long while. And anyway, I'll never have to see that cat's ass crack again, so that's worthy of celebration.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Still, let's not get too far afield from the shocking fact that this movie somehow crawled its way to the light after one of the most god-damnedest misadventures in animated film production this side of Foodfight! And, I mean, there you go - Paws of Fury could easily have been as bad as Foodfight!, but it's not even close. I would go so far as to say that Paws of Fury isn't even the worst children's action-comedy about a talking dog given wide release in North American theaters in July 2022, though I admit that while "better than Foodfight!" is clearing a bar that has been buried beneath several feet of dirt, "better than DC League of Super-Pets" is clearing a bar that has merely been nestled into the grass. And Paws of Fury still clips it on the way over.
Anyway, I don't think I'm doing a good job of being fair, and one does at least like to try. The thing is, this poor little ugly, unpleasant wretch of a movie had such a strange trip into theaters. The idea was born in 2010, when animation executive and producer Yair Landau hit upon an idea that is simple enou- no, it isn't. It really isn't. The idea is, somehow, "let's remake Mel Brooks's racism satire Blazing Saddles as a children's animated comedy about a Black samurai." Somebody pitched that. Other people thought it sounded good. And then a little bit after that pitch, somebody in all that thought what really needed to happen was that instead of being about an African samurai (possibly because Afro-Samurai was, literally, already taken, and there was some degree of shame that could penetrate the makers of this misbegotten concept), it should instead be about a dog, because children like comedies about talking animals, and he should face racism from cats, and that was the idea that was announced to the world as Blazing Samurai in 2014, though it wasn't until 2015 that it received a 2017 release date and an infamous teaser poster that was, for years, the only image associated with the film that existed.
The longer the movie went without meeting that or any release date, and without there being literally any other information than that cat's prodigious ass, the more it felt that Blazing Samurai simply had to be some kind of money-laundering affair. Having now seen the finished film, I'm not remotely prepared to write off that explanation. But anyway, I wasn't done with the story: between 2015 and 2019, there was basically nothing but that poster, haunting the places where new releases get announced, looming. The original production company and distributor both went out of business. And then in 2019, it was re-announced as having been completely re-structured financially, given its new title, picked up by a new set of production companies and instead of being a UK-USA co-production, it was now a UK-USA-Canada co-production, and at some point after 2019, China got involved. And again, I'm not willing to say it's not money laundering. The original directing team of Chris Bailey & Mark Koetsier got a little shuffle, becoming the directing team of Koetsier & Rob Minkoff, the latter of whom was originally a producer (and originally, long before that, co-directed The Lion King, and I imagine must have just a ton of questions about his career path), though Bailey retains a credit. When the dust had all settled and the contracts sorted, the film ended up with nine production companies to its name, seven credited producers, and twenty-five credited executive producers. Paramount Pictures, which ended up distributing the movie in most of the world, ended up acquiring those rights for all of $10 million, against a budget of at least $40-$45 million.
So anyway, given that God Himself tried to intervene to prevent Paws of Fury from ever coming out into the light of day, it's not half an achievement that the film is actually, like, watchable. The animation is pretty lousy, with all of the characters moving too stiffly, like they were rigged with too few points of articulation, and eyes that seem to glow and hover apart from their faces like flying saucers, but the characters have fairly readable expressions, and there's a lot of stylisation, particularly when somebody flashes back and their flashback is in strong, high-contrast color, flat lighting, and simplified textures, so it appears more like the pages of a four-color comic book in motion than anything else. Whether this stylisation is appropriate I leave as an irrelevant question, since nothing about Paws of Fury is well-conceived enough for "appropriate" to matter. Frankly, the more inappropriate something is for this bizarro-world concept, the likelier it is to be interesting.
Because, again, this is exactly the plot of Blazing Saddles (that film's screenwriters all receive credit - not even for the original script, they're credit with this script of this very movie), with cat hatred of dogs replacing human racism, and an extremely generic feudal Japan setting replacing the 19th Century American West. It's not merely the same story, in fact, there are many of the same jokes, including some said by the same man, since Mel Brooks himself has returned (he's one of those 25 EPs) to voice basically the same character as the corrupt governor he played in the 1974 film. Only not corrupt, since it's a kids' film, and thus has to be nice. But anyway, there are so many jokes that get recycled, having been carefully scrubbed down to family-friendliess. There is even, of all the possible jokes to bring back, a variation on "The sheriff is a ni-[bell rings]"; "The samurai is a do-[ring]" / "The samurai is a dong?" Which is, arguably, not even very family friendly.
It's all very baffling, how much "there" isn't there. Paws of Fury ended up with a weirdly well-supplied cast of actors that I cannot imagine were cheap, at least for the leads: Michael Cera is Hank, the hapless dog who wants to be the protector samurai of a town, Samuel L. Jackson is Jimbo (which is one of the vanishingly few subtle jokes here, combining "Jim", the Gene Wilder character from Blazing Saddles, and the iconic 1961 samurai masterpiece Yojimbo), the catnip addict ex-samurai who resentfully helps him, Ricky Gervais is Ika Chu, the scheming land owner who wants to destroy the tiny village of Kakamucho (which is, at least, permitted to remain relatively subtle, in that the film only has one explicit poop joke). The cast list continues on to give small roles to Michelle Yeoh, Gabriel Iglesias, Aasif Mandvi, Djimon Hounsou, and George Takei, the last of whom has to say "oh my" like five times, because apparently screenwriters Ed Stone and Nate Hopper ran out of ideas for jokes when they got past "re-use the original script but be sure to take out all the slurs and swears".
That's not a "best of all time" sort of cast, but it has some real talent - real talent who are in many cases actually trying (it is, in fact, downright surreal that Jackson, in particular, seems to be so invested in what he's doing, given how many years it's been since he last seemed this alive in live-action cinema. Then again, he might very well have recorded these lines back in 2015). So why squander them on such profoundly uninspired material? The best I can say about Paws of Fury is that there's something kind of dreamily fascinating and strange in hearing Brooks-style comedy, built around ridiculous flights of fancy and illogic and mundane surrealism, coming out of cartoon characters, who actually can be surreal and physically impossible in ways that makes the absurdity even more absurd. And, I mean, part of what you get when you rifle through the one-liners from one of the funniest screenplays of the 1970s is a whole movie full of road-tested comic dialogue, and none of the actors seem to mind that they're eating leftovers (even Brooks is doing something notably different).
When the film breaks away from Blazing Saddles, the results are pretty grim. Often it immediately races towards trite children's movie sentiments that were already stale in the 2000s, right about the time that the "talking animal comedy" itself became an ossified cliché. Some of the jokes just work much too hard for their idiocy, especially scatology: the film has an aggressively labored fart sequence that's based, of course, on the one from the older movie, but feels much heavier; there's also a bit that is just murderously bad when Hank announces that he needs to piss on a wall to mark his territory, something that feels totally alien to anything else in the movie to such a degree that even the other characters notice it.
So a bad movie, and when it is a "good movie", it's only because of shameless, open theft. But it is a miracle that it exists at all to be bad, and I have to admire that. Well, not "have to". And I don't actually admire it. But it's a defiant little bugger, the purest example of a film maudit clawing its way to the surface we've had in a very long while. And anyway, I'll never have to see that cat's ass crack again, so that's worthy of celebration.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
